I pushed quickly from the table, shot the poodle dagger eyes and snapped my fingers sharply. “Come on, ‘precious.’ Let’s take a walk in the nice Chicago evening! Maybe down by the river! The deep part!”
“Oh, dear--are we being sarcastic?” she trotted past me to the door. “Is that what we’re being now, sarcastic with the starving poodle?”
“Shut up.”
“Cause in my present condition I must warn you I have very limited control! Don’t make me fang you, Ed, not in front of the girls!”
“I hate it when you’re like this.”
“Really? Try being a vampire sometime, learn real hate! Sneaking around the gutters at night with these damn fangs, constantly trying not to bite your own tongue, looking for some baked slob who smells like Sterno and vomit to sink your—“
“Ed--?” Sylvie caught up with us at the door, my jacket in her hand. “Here, it can get nippy at night this close to the water.”
“Thanks.”
She smoothed my lapels like a worried mother. “Be careful. It’s getting dark, and it is Chicago. Where are you taking her?”
“Just around the block.”
“Good.” She nodded relief. “Might want to steer clear of Market Street—rough neighborhood.” And she kissed me on the cheek.
“Thank you again,” I told the big olive eyes.
“Awww,” from Mindy at the table, “that’s sweet…”
“He’s such a gentleman!” from Mandy next to her.
“Some of us still haven’t eaten!” from down by my ankles.
* * *
“Market Street, right?”
I nodded.
“The ‘rough neighborhood, right?’ Where all the crummy people hang out--who deserve to be bitten?”
I stopped under a lamp to check the street sign. “What, you’re getting philosophical now? I thought you were starving to death, fantasizing about Mandy’s neck, etc.”
“Just because I’m a vampire, Ed, doesn’t mean I’m not human.”
“That makes a lot of sense.”
“You know what I mean. Part of Alicia is still inside me here. Somewhere.”
“Alicia is a vampire, Mitzi. As I recall.”
“That’s not the point! What I mean is—wait a second. What do you mean ‘Alicia is’?”
“Sorry?”
“Don’t be coy. You said ‘Alicia is a vampire’. But Alicia’s dead. I mean, dead, dead. Fell off the hotel roof onto fence spikes, all that?”
“Yeah? So?”
“So, she’s dead! Right? Right?”
I hesitated before crossing the next dark street, pricked up my ears. “Sh! Listen! Hear that?”
Mitzi cocked her head. “Yeah, so?”
“So what’s it sound like?”
Mitzi sniffed the air. “Like a couple of guys behind that building over there. Smells like it too.”
I craned up, checked the street sign above us again. “How many guys?”
“I don’t have X-Ray vision, Ed. I’m a dog, not Super—
“How many!”
“I don’t know! Two? Maybe three? Shall I trot over and see if one of them is crummy enough to fang? Why do you keep looking at that damn street sign?”
I turned from the sign, gazed down the long, well-lit street. “This look like a rough part of town to you?”
Mitzi glanced around, shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been to Chicago before. Actually…”
“What?”
“…I was going to say it looks rather trendy. Upscale even.”
“I was thinking the same. So why did Sylvie warn us off Market Street?”
Mitzi sighed impatience. “That growl you hear is not me, it’s my stomach!”
“These guys over behind the building-- what do they smell like?”
She rolled her eyes. “Like guys! Men! Two or three! Three, I think. Sweating! Maybe they—wait a second…”
I looked down at her. Her nose was twitching.
“Only one of them is sweating…” She looked up at me.
“Making the other two…vampires?”
She nodded.
I nodded. “Two vampires and one human. Is it an attack? Having themselves a nighttime snack, you think?”
Mitzi cocked her head, sniffed. “I don’t, actually. No odor of panic or fear. Hmm...I can smell gas, too. A vehicle. A truck, I think.”
I stepped under the darker shadows of a building overhang to make sure I was concealed. I began moving furtively down the sidewalk to the voices, back to the wall. “Let’s check it out…”
We reached the end of the sidewalk, still in deep shadow, and peered across the street from behind a berm of trash cans. There was a truck, a deuce and a half, its tail backed up to the loading dock of one of the shops. Three men in work overall were unloading something from the opened canvass back—angular shapes, like packing boxes or crates—carrying them inside the open, unlit back door of the shop.
Mitzi craned over a garbage lid. “What are those things?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, if it was 1933 I’d say they were moving bootleg liquor to the back of a Chicago speakeasy.”
“Prohibition’s over, last time I checked. Maybe they’re just supplies of some kind. Only—“
I nodded. “—only what’s a lone human doing working with two vampires?”
Mitzi sniffed the air. “Maybe he doesn’t know they’re vampires?”
“But they know he’s human. Why aren’t they attacking him?”
“Maybe the Chicago labor union allows vampires.”
“Knowingly? That’s ridiculous.”
“Those guys are all part of the same crew, Ed. They know each other. Well.”
“I don’t get it.”
Mitzi shrugged. “Maybe they’re some kind of independent--hey! Where’re you going!”
I was heading back the way we came, striding quickly under the shadowed overhand. “To take a peek through the front of that shop! You coming?”
“And all this is going to get me fed—how?”
“Maybe that place is a blood bank, they’re unloading hemoglobin.”
“Funny, oh you’re funny.”
“Hurry up, Mitz, I need your vampiric night vision.”
But we didn’t need her night vision after all.
There was a lone ceiling light illuminating the interior of the shop softly—the only store with a light on in the block. Figures moved about mechanically within.
“Let’s get a better vantage point.”
We crossed the street stealthily, crouched partly concealed behind a parked Chevy and a Toyota, a safe distance from the street lamp. The shop’s overhead sign wasn’t lit but you could make out the lettering from the window’s glow beneath: De la Rue.
“’Of The Street,’” Mitzi noted. “Look at those interior walls.”
“They’re hanging canvasses. It’s an art gallery.”
Canvasses of every size, shape and color were carefully framed and mounted on rough-textured brick under individual track lighting. Very chic.
“Trendy,” I grunted, “like you said. Like the whole street says. So why would Sylvie tell us to stay clear of an area so clearly gentrified?”
We crouched lower as an office door opened near the back of the gallery. A tall, commanding figure came out, mostly back-lit from the office interior. He was carrying a small framed canvass in one hand. Another figure trailed him, a woman. They were little more than silhouettes, impossible to make out their faces or even their clothes under the dim ceiling light.
They stood with their backs to us appraising a vacant section of wall space within the gallery, pointing, gesturing, tilting their heads speculatively.
“The owner and his secretary, maybe,” I murmured, “must be setting up for a new show. Don’t care much for the painter’s work, do you? Alleyways and dumpsters. This is art?”
“Maybe that’s why it’s called De la Rue,” from Mitzi.
The woman wa
s gesturing at an empty space near a brick-faced corner. The man held up the painting in his hands as if for size, tilted his head back and forth. Both of them turned as two of the workmen from the truck came in proffering armfuls of brown paper-wrapped crates, setting them against the gallery walls. One by one the workmen began carefully removing the brown wrappings.
The woman returned her attention to the empty wall space. She stepped backward toward us and came more fully into the ceiling light’s glow. She was platinum blonde, her hair pulled up in a French bun, and statuesque, elegant in black power suit and heels. As we watched she lit a cigarette, puffed a blue skein at the trendy, open duct work ceiling.
The tall owner was still accessing the wall space.
I heard a low rumble so deep I thought it was a distant truck. It turned out to be Mitzi right beside me.
“What’s the matter--?”
I could see the fine hairs stiffening along her spine. “The owner, or whoever he is…”
“What about him?”
“He’s one of them.”
I felt a chill climb my spine. “A vampire? You’re sure?”
“No, Ed. Not a vampire. The vampire.”
I didn’t get it for a second. Then the chill climbed all the way to the back of my neck. “You don’t mean--”
“Yes. Ivan.”
I couldn’t breathe.
I squinted hard at the display window. “Are you sure! We actually found him? Already?”
“Ed--?”
“We just stumbled onto him a few block from Sylvie’s—“
“Ed—“
“I mean what are the odds—“ I broke off suddenly. Looked down at Mitzi.
She stared up silently at me.
“We didn’t just ‘stumble’ onto him, did we?”
“No.”
“Sylvie didn’t want us running into by accident.”
“Ed. His assistant. The woman…”
I looked back at the shop. The statuesque figure in the power suit. My skin crawled.
“No,” I whispered.
“’Fraid so.”
I shook my head in denial. “That woman’s dressed like an executive, for chrissake! Her hair is almost white!”
“Ed, it’s Clancy.”
I took an incredulous step closer to the curb. “I can’t believe…”
But I could believe. Especially when she started moving again, removing another painting from one of the crates. I’d know those movements, that figure, those fluid gestures anywhere…
I stood stiffly there on the dark sidewalk feeling my cheeks begin to burn.
I pushed my telepathic talents urgently toward the little shop, opening myself up…
I was met by a blank wall of nothing.
“It can’t be her! Clancy’s a Reader! I can’t pick her up!”
“It’s her, Ed.”
I was beginning to lose it. “Oh, yeah? You transmit to her! Say something! Anything!”
“Ed, what do you think I’ve been trying to do from the moment I caught her scent? I’m hitting the same blank wall you are!”
A cold fury bloomed inside me. “What’s he done to her? What’s the bastard done to her?”
I almost came around the front of the Chevy impulsively, heading for the front door--checked myself at the last second.
I became aware of my nails digging into my palms from tightly closed fists.
“He’s got her under some kind of…spell! My God, he must have complete control of her mind! How can he do that, Mitz? Vampires can’t transmit, it’s a known fact! Who the hell is this guy?”
“The same Ivan Kolcheck we know and loathe…and then some, apparently.”
I stood there impotently, half my mind searching about me for anything vaguely resembling a stake, the other half knowing exactly how much chance I’d have against a power like Kolcheck, let alone his goons.
In my mind’s eye I could see again the Prince of Vampires standing at the edge of that hotel escarpment, raising his long arms high and sending a wave of energy across the convention roof that put every costumed witch and werewolf into a state of mass hypnosis, wiping their collective minds clean of his presence and that of the whirring black helicopter above him. Saw the entire crowd turn away and go back to being good little oblivious conventioneers while Ivan Kolcheck did battle with Queen of the Vampires Alicia, smashing her repeatedly to the convention floor while setting the entire roof afire. Then—his chief antagonist disposed of—take my lovely Clancy in his strong, mocking arms and sweep her into the night sky and out of my life…
I blinked away the memory as the two workers inside the shop finished their unwrapping and retreated out the back door to work again.
Leaving only Ivan and my lovely Clancy within the shop.
“Now’s our chance, Mitz! If we’re ever going to catch him off guard now’s the time to do it! Mitzi? Mitzi?”
I looked around me. The poodle was gone.
That’s when I heard the swearing from the back of the shop.
I took a final glance about for Clancy and darted quickly back down the darkened street toward the back of the building.
I slowed when I came to the end of the brick, got my breath, and—back pressed flat against the bricks—peered around the corner at the loading truck.
The three truckers were there. But one of them—and I knew exactly which one—was sprawled on the ground, a black blot of blood pooling under his head. Even from that distance I could see the two puncture wounds in his pale neck.
The two worker vampires were standing over him, gesturing accusingly, cursing at each other amid rising whispers.
“—the hell you think you’re doing! Kolcheck will kill us for this!”
“Me? I didn’t do nothin’! I thought it was you!”
“How could it be me? I was inside the gallery with you!”
“You came in after me! You was out here in the alley tappin’ Max here!”
“I don’t tap nobody during working hours! You fanged him!”
“Do I look that stupid?”
“Well, who then?”
The two stopped yelling abruptly, stepped back slowly from the body and began looking warily over their shoulders. “…must’ve been someone outside the organization…”
The other shook his head nervously. “Who’d be that dumb…every vampire in Chicago knows Ivan…who’d have the guts?”
I’d been listening so intently to their voices I’d unwittingly stepped from the shadow of the building behind me and into overhead street light. As the vampire’s vision swung my way, there was a sudden firm pressure on my ankle--and I was jerked back into the shadow of the overhang.
“You’re getting careless,” Mitzi said in my head.
I looked down at her in the darkness. “I’m being careless? I’m being careless!”
“Look, I told you I was starving, Ed—“
“I’m being careless!”
“He was just some drifter, not even part of their organization—whatever that is.”
“Why don’t you just trot over there and give them our calling card!”
“Take it easy, Eddie! I didn’t turn him…”
It was all I could do to keep my voice down. “Great! So when he wakes up he can tell them all about the vampire poodle who dropped by for a snack! Were you out of your freakin’ mind?”
“Yes! With hunger! I told you! When I get past a certain point, I can’t see straight—start fanging the first thing that walks by! I’m a freakin’ vampire, Ed, what do you expect me to do, ask for their blood type?”
I stood there shaking with rage, even though I could clearly see the apology brimming in her big poodle eyes. “We get lucky enough to find Clancy on our first night in town and you jeopardize all our lives by—“
“Yeah,” she snorted defensively, “some Clancy! Traded her telepathy for a new hair style and a power suit! Strutting about like a Park Avenue rich bitch—“
“She’s still Clancy, Mi
tz!”
“She’s a fucking robot, Ed.”
I was trying to summon the proper retort when there was noise behind the gallery.
Mitzi’s head swung that way first. “Oh, shit. Here comes trouble…”
I turned to see Ivan himself emerging from the glowing back door of the gallery, the two vampire truckers looking up in surprise from opposite sides of the body at their feet.
Ivan Kolcheck said nothing, didn’t even look in a hurry.
You got the feeling the guy had never been in a hurry in his life—never had to be—because his presence preceded him everywhere. He went like a pressure wave before a cruising shark. The back alley fell silent at his approach, but it also felt like the whole street went still, maybe the whole city. Everything about him radiated strength and power and a dragging sense of doom. You found yourself holding your breath.
He looked down at the body on the concrete, then up at the other two truckers, still saying nothing.
The two trembling vampires pointed across the sprawled body at each other, stuttering in unison. “It was him!”
Ivan watched them calmly a moment. Then raised his hand almost casually.
The two quaking vampires were flung backward against the back of the loading truck like a pair of swatted flies. They bounced simultaneously off the rear bumper and landed back on other side of the body.
Ivan looked at them one more time.
“We was with you, boss!” one of them begged, “You saw us! Unwrapping the pictures! When we come back out to finish up, we find Max here on his face! It wasn’t us, honest! Why would we fang a fellow worker without permission!”
“Yeah,” the other chimed hopefully, “especially when we ain’t got paid yet!”
Ivan turned to him like he was addressing an ape.
Then he turned his gaze to the streets and alleys around him.
Mitzi and I pressed deeper into overhang shadows, but for one horrible instant I could swear the Vampire Prince’s glowing eyes lingered on us a moment. Did he really see us there in the blackness? Could he smell us? Or simply feel us?
I jerked as a lithe silhouette filled the back door glow. Clancy.
Ivan turned to her calmly, murmured something to her. She turned and disappeared into the gallery again.
Ivan turned back to the two trembling workmen. “Finish unloading the canvasses. Let me know when he wakes up. I’ll have questions.”
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